The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  “It was difficult to call. You and your client aren’t my only concern, you know. I have a job.”

  “I don’t care. For what we’re paying you, you ought to have been on the phone sooner.”

  The answer was quick. “Fire me, then.”

  Kapp held back his instinctive reply that for what they’d paid him, they owned the Fixer. There was no such thing as his job, no such thing as other priorities. But it would be pointless arguing about that now.

  “Forget it.” Kapp rubbed at his forehead. The headache that had begun that morning had settled into a throbbing point right behind his eyes. “What happened?”

  “You know most of it. I dropped off the packages as planned. Your drunken friend let one get loose and—”

  “How did the fire start?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Is Oakes alive?”

  “No.”

  The Fixer’s tone was certain and Kapp felt himself relax by some slight increment.

  Oakes was a prime example of the kind of misplaced loyalty that inevitably brought great men down. A failure at everything he’d ever tried, a degenerate drunk and a pedophile, Oakes had nevertheless saved Dennis Hunt from drowning when they were both children. And Hunt prized loyalty over all other things.

  Too bad. Blindly depending on people like Oakes was extremely dangerous. That the man was dead might just make this whole thing salvable.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  A chuckle. “That paramedic saved us a lot of trouble. Maybe you should hire her.”

  “What about the farm? Anything there we have to worry about?”

  “The packages only ever saw Oakes.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure about that too?”

  “I assisted, wore a mask. They saw Oakes at the farm. That’s it.”

  Kapp knew well that the Fixer had certain rules. He selected the girls, from criminal or Human Services records—those who had records of running away or no reachable next of kin. He located the girls, assisted with taking the girls, even delivered the girls to one or another of Hunt’s go-betweens. But that was the limit of his involvement, and he was always careful never to be seen.

  “We have to be absolutely certain there won’t be any blowback.”

  “You pay me for advice.” The Fixer sounded bored. “Doesn’t mean you have to take it. But stirring this up more is the last thing any of us need.”

  “That’s something we’ll have to think about.”

  “You should let this die down,” the Fixer persisted.” Let Oakes eat all of this, hear me? There’s no point in getting your other guy involved.”

  The “other guy” was Gavril Sechev, Hunt’s bodyguard, though he was more like a guard dog: ruthless and fiercely loyal. A real sadist—Hunt had remarked once that the man ate pain and shit out hope—Sechev had no rules or limits and in fact enjoyed dealing with the girls once Hunt and his friends were finished with them. But he could be sloppy as well, and Kapp would be just as glad to keep him out of this. Unfortunately, Hunt liked to “act decisively,” as he called it. Persuading him to simply wait and let things take their course could prove problematic.

  “So you’re telling me we don’t need to intervene further?”

  “The place went up like a matchbox. The girls who escaped won’t know anything about me or any of the rest of us…” Kapp heard careful consideration in the silence. “Or am I wrong?”

  The pain behind Kapp’s eyes was spearing upward toward the intolerable. He sank into his chair and clawed open the top drawer of his desk, located the bottle of Tylenol 3s and popped two, then groped for his coffee to wash them down.

  “You’re not wrong,” he said. “The farm was in the Oakes family for three generations. Clean, as far as we’re concerned. He had numbers to two burner phones—”

  “Destroyed, I hope? Where were they used?”

  “Destroyed, yes. And their SIM cards were never inside them except to place a call, all accepted in random areas miles from anywhere the police would find interesting.”

  “Not bad.” There was admiration in the Fixer’s voice. “Computers?”

  “Oakes had none, didn’t communicate that way. Nothing to link back to us. The police should conclude that he acted alone.”

  And you’ll help with that, of course. Kapp wiped at his forehead. It looked as if this shitstorm might just blow by them, though close enough that the stink of it would hopefully scare Hunt onto the straight and narrow. After the election, Hunt would have to give up his darker hobbies anyway. Perhaps he could be persuaded to start now.

  “Of course,” the Fixer answered breezily, as if reading his mind, “last night caused me a lot of trouble. I had to take some big risks.”

  Kapp knew what was coming. “You set your price already.”

  An exasperated sigh, the kind a recalcitrant child would receive. “Yes, but that was before these complications.”

  “Complications you should have prevented.”

  The Fixer took a long breath, and when he replied there was carefully controlled anger in his voice. “Be careful, Mr. Kapp. Be very careful. I didn’t fuck up and I didn’t choose that idiot to hold your packages. You did that. I cleaned up for you.”

  “All right,” Kapp sighed. “How does thirty thousand sound?”

  “Nearly half as good as seventy thousand, and that’s with a discount.”

  Kapp was silent and the Fixer rightly took this as foot-dragging because his voice sharpened with irritation. “The cheezie-haired retard down south paid a porn star more than that just to keep quiet about humping him, and you can guarantee I will keep quiet.”

  Yes, he would. The Fixer was on the sharp end, had blood on his hands. And the blood of children, no less.

  “All right. Same place?” The same place was a numbered account in one of Grand Cayman’s six hundred banks.

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “All right, I’ll be in touch.” Kapp disconnected.

  Hunt wouldn’t be happy about the price, but it was his own fault for being loyal to a man who could barely tie his own shoes and this was too important for nickel and diming. The Conservative Action Party was poised for a sweeping electoral victory. A lot of people in Canada wanted the kind of revolution Hunt was promising: for Canada to be about real Canadians for a change.

  The Fixer’s bill was a small price to pay to accomplish that.

  Nineteen

  Hands shaking on the steering wheel, Paul Arcand swung his Hummer into his driveway as he fumbled for the garage door opener. When the door slid upward, he edged the vehicle inside and gave a slow, controlled exhalation as he slid the gearshift into park, hands still shaking. Another deep breath while he waited for the door to slide all the way back down, and then he began to scream.

  Long, body-wrenching screams. No one outside would hear him, but maybe up in heaven, Sophie would.

  Eight long hours he’d held it in, sitting at his desk in IT Support in the bowels of the Pendam Oil building in downtown Calgary. Since he lived in the internet anyway, he felt lucky he’d found a way to make a living at it. Working in IT allowed him to spend the better part of every day hunting for the men who’d destroyed everything he loved.

  It had seemed an impossible task, even considering the blue-ribbon hacking skills he’d been honing since he was a teen. He had nothing to go on. No names, no personal information, not even the license plate of the van into which Sophie had been thrown when she was fifteen years old.

  Kidnapped. Raped. Left for dead.

  Sophie had come through the ordeal with few detailed recollections. Her memories were a confused cyclone of three days of horror and pain as the men in the van assaulted her again and again. A gang of them—bikers, maybe—on some kind of binge, the cops thought. Sophie had described odours of marijuana and alcohol, a sizzling smell the lead detective thought might be the scent of crack cocaine.

  Blindfolded, she caught only glimpses of them wh
en the oil-stained rag covering her eyes slipped. Arcand still had the yellowed police report pinned to the bulletin board in his home office. Victim states she observed a tattoo on one of the assailant’s arms. It is described as a cobra wrapped around her assailant’s right wrist. A second assailant had what appeared to be a surgical scar on the lower left abdomen.

  They had dumped Sophie in a snowy field on the outskirts of Edmonton in sub-zero weather, to die of exposure and perhaps be written off as such. But a man discarding trash illegally in the same vacant lot heard moans coming from behind piles of refuse and called 9-1-1.

  Arcand’s sister had never been the same after she escaped. She’d left the hospital an empty husk of herself, her love of family, music, and life drained out of her. Her rapists had murdered her in the end, though it took another three years for the poisonous despair to finish killing her. His beautiful, kind, innocent sister climbed into a bathtub one day behind a locked door and swallowed a bottleful of antidepressants that had never been a match for her pain anyway.

  Their mother—a heartbroken wraith herself by then—had died in her sleep not long after while their father, a long-haul trucker and the very embodiment of a strong, tough man, was dying in a hospice a year later, cancer eating through his pancreas.

  An outsider might look at Arcand’s history and remark on the terrible, unrelenting twists of fate. Arcand knew better. The predators that had taken Sophie on that dark empty street had injected a venom into her that had spread through their whole family.

  Paul Arcand had no life, no friends, no real relationships since that day. Alone for the last fifteen years, he did nothing outside of work but search for Sophie’s abductors. With the skills he acquired in university, no electronic device on earth was forbidden to him. He could punch through any firewall, weave his way through any security protocol. Police databases. Interpol. The dark web was rife with inhuman monsters wearing human masks, but all he had to go on was a glimpse of a tattoo and a scar… All that time and he’d found nothing.

  Then today. Ironically, not on the web.

  As he headed for work that morning, crossing through downtown traffic on 8th Avenue, he’d seen the Calgary Herald headline through a shop window. It blazed at him like a signal from hell.

  Paramedic Rescues Abduction Victims.

  He’d stared at it, eyes riveted on the newsprint, registering none of the jostling of rush hour commuters bustling by him.

  A fire. Teenage victims held captive. The pudgy, pasty visage of the abductor himself glaring out from what might have been an old police photo. It showed the man from the waist up, the clear outline of a snake tattoo circling up from his right wrist.

  A bang on the window and Arcand had looked up to see the aging Lebanese shop owner glaring at him through the glass. Want it? Buy it.

  He did.

  But before he was even back on the street, he had his phone out. Entering passwords, swiping through firewalls. Looking for a better picture.

  There. A close-up of the dead man’s arm. A cobra, for certain, on the right arm of a pedophile rapist.

  And a name to go with it.

  Darryl Oakes.

  One name would lead to others. It was inevitable.

  Arcand sat in his car, his throat raw from screaming, his face wet with sweat and tears. Eventually, he loosed his cramped fingers from the steering wheel and got out of his car.

  It was time to inflict some pain now. This paramedic Keller had given him a great gift, killing one of his sister’s rapists. It was his job now to find the others.

  And punish them.

  Twenty

  September 19

  Keller’s boyfriend broke up with her while she was in rehab.

  That wasn’t what the therapists at Summerview Centre for Mental Health and Addictions called therapy, of course. To them it was a “residential treatment program,” but Keller had been raised by a cop father who’d never beaten around the bush.

  So, rehab. And the breakup thing. Shitty.

  She got home to her acreage about noon on her first day of freedom, threw a stack of mail on the coffee table, dropped her bag on the floor, and walked around opening curtains and cracking windows, ushering in long-overdue fresh air and warm September sun.

  Her plants were all half-dead or dying, and there was a correlation between this and Nolan, the former BF. He had assured her he’d been diligent in caring for her house during her first week in Summerview, but his visits to her place had naturally halted about the time he sent her a breakup text halfway through her second week, when news of her escapades started going national. He seemed to have lifted the two hundred dollars she kept under a flour jar in the kitchen, too. Classy all the way.

  The text was a doubly endearing choice since she hadn’t been allowed a cellphone while in Summerview. She’d suspected something was wrong only after two missed Tuesday afternoon visits, but she hadn’t been sure he’d flown the coop till she was discharged and plugged her dead phone into her car charger.

  No boyfriend. Dying plants. National infamy. It was odd to be sitting in her living room for the first time in three weeks, trying to decide which of these disasters was worthy of the most grief.

  The thought of it all made her wish for a hit of fentanyl, but only in the way you might wish you could have a moment of high school back. A perfect moment, like kissing the boy you thought you might love forever. A lovely memory that you knew would never be real again.

  At Summerview they’d put her on suboxone at first, a poor substitute for perfect moments, it had to be said. It was a classically employed drug in the treatment of addicts, sort of a second-generation methadone. The formulation was a combination of a weak-assed synthetic opioid called buprenorphine and a commonly employed narcotic antidote called naloxone. The theory was that the opioid staved off the physical symptoms of withdrawal while the naloxone ensured there was none of the pleasant narcotic effect that addicts treasure so much. A bitter little tablet dissolved under the tongue once a day and an altogether poor imitation of the real thing.

  Keller began weaning herself off the suboxy a week in, principally because the people dishing it out offered no solid end date for its use, saying that some addicts took the drug for an indefinite period afterward. That sounded like the proverbial slippery slope and she’d already sacrificed enough. Besides, suboxy didn’t keep the bad dreams away, and that was half the reason for her love affair with fentanyl.

  So, she’d come out of rehab—sorry, “residential treatment”—on nothing except fresh air and good intentions.

  None of which really was any substitute for the tickle of a narcotic, but that was that. She wasn’t sure if nostalgia for fentanyl counted as a bad thing, but—silver lining and all that—anything short of actually eating them ought to be okay.

  And okay would have to do. Okay was going to have to do for a lot of things in the near future.

  She moved around the room, triaging the dying plants and thinking perhaps a few might be saved. The rest looked done for. The thought provoked tears, so she guessed, all things considered, she was going to miss the plants more than Nolan.

  Amazon Alexa, thank goodness, had not deserted her. She called out to it, and soon Springsteen was singing about girls in summer clothes while she thought about priorities. Groceries? She couldn’t face the thought of shopping. Cleaning? Ugh.

  Narcan?

  Nearly a year ago, when it seemed like accidentally overdosing might credibly be a danger for her, she’d prepped four syringes of Narcan and stashed them under the bathroom sink.

  Guess I can get rid of those now.

  Was that wise? It was early days yet. There were too many decisions to make. She ran a hand through her hair and found the TV remote.

  Distraction was key, she’d learned, for a recovering addict. Organize a drawer—five minutes. Laundry—another five, ten if you bothered sorting lights and darks. A meal could be a good thirty minutes, maybe forty-five if you were doing the cooki
ng yourself, sans microwave. A good movie was gold—two hours easy if you included pee breaks. A decent number of such distractions and suddenly you had another day behind you without getting high.

  At Summerview, they’d told her that TV could be a “good” or “bad” distraction. Probably a good idea not to watch Scarface or Trainspotting. The deadly dull twenty-four-hour enrage-a-thons on Fox or CNN were okay. Sci-fi worked best for Keller, though. She loved it anyway and the characters were rarely addicted to anything except bad dialogue.

  She tried to relax on the couch, itchy and uncomfortable in a home that didn’t feel like home anymore. But they’d told her about that, too. Environments where you’d gotten high would inevitably remind you of getting high. Best to avoid them.

  Tough when you live there.

  Distractions. She thumbed the remote and the TV flared to life. She saw a young male reporter, perfectly tousled hair and flawless skin, clutching a microphone in front of a rally of some kind. He spoke in low tones about a surge in popular support for Canada’s newest political movement, the Conservative Action Party, and their leader, Dennis Hunt. She vaguely recognized the ruddy-faced, balding red-haired man speaking at a lectern behind the reporter. From what she could gather, he was talking about immigration.

  Politics. The most completely and abysmally boring thing in the world. But she was just grateful it wasn’t about her. Rehab had its pluses. It had allowed her to miss the mostly sensational arc of her story in the media.

  Hunt was talking about immigration. Kind of shouting about it, actually. She winced. She wasn’t that grateful.

  Netflix? She tried but got a “Connection Error” message.

  “Damn it.” Once or twice a month the Wi-Fi went wonky and she had to reset the router, but that could wait. Back to TV. On the space channel, a rerun of Star Trek: Discovery was playing.

  Much better.

  As the characters on screen prepared to disobey orders and visit a forbidden planet—de rigueur in space—Keller went to the kitchen and found her fridge still stocked with Pepsi. Score. Caffeine was a socially acceptable addiction… and less likely to kill you than fentanyl by magnitudes, it had to be said.